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Self-Actualizing and Beyond
- By Abraham Maslow
- Published 07/3/2008
- Positive Psychology
Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was an American psychologist noted for his concept of a "hierarchy of human needs" - with self-actualization at the top. He is considered an originator of humanistic and positive psychology, and wrote about people having an "authentic self", a personal core that strives towards growth. His ideas are still very active in psychology, management training and life coaching. Below are some of his writings that show the connection of Abraham Maslow and Humanism.
Selected quotes from Chapter Three of The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, by Abraham H. Maslow
"What I would like to do now is to explore some aspects of the nature of self-actualization , not as a grand abstraction, but in terms of the operational meaning of the self-actualization process.
"What does self-actualization mean in moment-to-moment terms? What does it mean on Tuesday at four o'clock?"
"Being Values. Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something is very precious to them - some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense.
"They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears. One devotes his life to the law, another to justice, another to beauty or truth.
"All, in one way or another, devote their lives to the search for what I have called the "being" values ("B" for short), the ultimate values which are intrinsic, which cannot be reduced to anything more ultimate....they are the values of being.
(Here is his listing of the "B" values.)
1. Truth: honesty; reality; (nakedness; simplicity; richness; essentialy; oughtness; beauty; pure; clean and unadulterated completeness).
2. Goodness: (rightness; desirability; oughtness; justice; benevolence; honesty); (we love it, are attracted to it, approve of it).
3. Beauty: (rightness; form; aliveness; simplicity; richness; wholeness; perfection; completion; uniqueness; honesty).
4. Wholeness: (unity; integration; tendency to oneness; interconnectedness; simplicity; organization; structure; order, not dissociated; synergy ; homonomous and integrative tendencies).
4a.Dichotomy-transcendence: (acceptance; resolution; intergration, or transcendence of dichotomies, polarities, opposites, contradictions); synergy (i.e., transformation of oppositions into unities, of antagonists into collaborating or mutually enhancing partners).
5. Aliveness: (process; not-deadness; spontaneity; self-regulation; full-functioning; changing and yet remaining the same; expressing itself).
6. Uniqueness: (idiosyncrasy; individuality; noncomparability; novelty; quale; suchness; nothing else like it).
7. Perfection: (nothing superfluous; nothing lacking; everything in its right place; unimprovable; just-rightness; just-so-ness; suitability; justice; completeness; nothing beyond; oughtness).
7a. Necessity: (inevitability; it must be just that way; not changed in any slightest way; and it is good that it is that way).
8. Completion: (ending; finality; justice; it's finished; no more changing of the Gestalt; fulfillment; finis and telos; nothing missing or lacking; totality; fulfillment of destiny; cessation; climax; consumation closure; death before rebirth; cessation and completion of growth and development).
9. Justice: (fairness; oughtness; suitability; architectonic quality; necessity; inevitability; disinterestedness; nonpartiality).
10. Simplicity: (honesty; nakedness; essentiality; abstract, unmistakability; essential skeletal structure; the heart of the matter; bluntness; only that which is necessary; without ornament; nothing extra or superfluous).
11. Richness: (differentiation; complexity; intricacy; totality; nothing missing or hidden; all there; "nonimportance"; i.e., everything is equally important; nothing is unimportant; everything left the way it is; without improving, simplifying, abstracting, rearranging).
12. Effortlessness: (ease; lack of strain, striving, or difficulty; grace; perfect and beautiful functioning).
13. Playfulness: (fun; joy; amusement; gaiety; humor; exuberance; effortlessness).
14. Self-sufficiency: (autonomy; independence; not-needing-anything-other-than-itself-in-order-to-be-itself; self-determining; environment-transcendence; separateness; living by its own laws; identity).
"...self actualizing means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption. It means experiencing without the self-consciousness of the adolescent. At this moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment.....the key word for this is "selflessly," and our youngsters suffer from too little selflessness and to much self-consciousness, self-awareness."
"To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process; it means making of the many single choices about whether to lie or be honest, whether to steal or not to steal at a particular point, and it means to make each of these choices as a growth choice. This is movement toward self-actualization."
"Looking within oneself for many of the answers implies taking responsibility. That is in itself a great step towards actualization....one can see it, can feel it, can know the moment of responsibility. Then there is a clear knowing of what it feels like. This is one of the great steps. Each time one takes responsibility, this is an actualizing of the self."
"The art world, in my opinion, has been captured by a small group of opinion- and taste-makers about whom I feel suspicious. That is an ad hominem judgement, but it seems fair enough for people who set themselves up as able to say, 'You like what I like or else you are a fool.' We must teach people to listen to their own tastes. Most people don't do it."
"Making an honest statement involves daring to be different, unpopular, nonconformist...to be courageous rather than afraid is a another version of the same thing."
"...self actualization is not only an end state but also the process of actualizing one's potentialities at any time, in any amount. It is, for example, a matter of becoming smarter by studying if one is an intelligent person. Self-actualization means using one's intelligence. It does not mean doing some far-out thing necessarily, but it may mean going through an arduous and demanding period of preparation in order to realize one's possibilities....self actualization means working to do well the thing that one wants to do."
"...peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization. They are moments of ecstasy which cannot be taught, cannot be guaranteed, cannot be sought. One must be, as C.S. Lewis wrote, 'surprised by joy.' "
"...finding out who one is, what he is, what he likes, what he doesn't like, what is good for him and what is bad, where he is going and what his mission is - opening oneself up to himself...it means identifying defenses, and after defenses have been identified, it means finding the courage to give them up.
"This is painful because defenses are erected against something which is unpleasant. But giving up the defenses is worthwhile. If the psychoanalytic literature has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that repression is not a good way of solving problems."
"...self-actualization is not a matter of one great moment. It is not true that on Thursday at four o'clock the trumpet blows and one steps into the pantheon forever and altogether. Self-actualization is a matter of degree, of little accessions accumulated one by one."
[Source: http://tidefans.com/forums/showthread.php?p=58727]
Book: The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, by Abraham H. Maslow
"What I would like to do now is to explore some aspects of the nature of self-actualization , not as a grand abstraction, but in terms of the operational meaning of the self-actualization process.
"What does self-actualization mean in moment-to-moment terms? What does it mean on Tuesday at four o'clock?"
"Being Values. Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something is very precious to them - some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense.
"They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears. One devotes his life to the law, another to justice, another to beauty or truth.
"All, in one way or another, devote their lives to the search for what I have called the "being" values ("B" for short), the ultimate values which are intrinsic, which cannot be reduced to anything more ultimate....they are the values of being.
(Here is his listing of the "B" values.)
1. Truth: honesty; reality; (nakedness; simplicity; richness; essentialy; oughtness; beauty; pure; clean and unadulterated completeness).
2. Goodness: (rightness; desirability; oughtness; justice; benevolence; honesty); (we love it, are attracted to it, approve of it).
3. Beauty: (rightness; form; aliveness; simplicity; richness; wholeness; perfection; completion; uniqueness; honesty).
4. Wholeness: (unity; integration; tendency to oneness; interconnectedness; simplicity; organization; structure; order, not dissociated; synergy ; homonomous and integrative tendencies).
4a.Dichotomy-transcendence: (acceptance; resolution; intergration, or transcendence of dichotomies, polarities, opposites, contradictions); synergy (i.e., transformation of oppositions into unities, of antagonists into collaborating or mutually enhancing partners).
5. Aliveness: (process; not-deadness; spontaneity; self-regulation; full-functioning; changing and yet remaining the same; expressing itself).
6. Uniqueness: (idiosyncrasy; individuality; noncomparability; novelty; quale; suchness; nothing else like it).
7. Perfection: (nothing superfluous; nothing lacking; everything in its right place; unimprovable; just-rightness; just-so-ness; suitability; justice; completeness; nothing beyond; oughtness).
7a. Necessity: (inevitability; it must be just that way; not changed in any slightest way; and it is good that it is that way).
8. Completion: (ending; finality; justice; it's finished; no more changing of the Gestalt; fulfillment; finis and telos; nothing missing or lacking; totality; fulfillment of destiny; cessation; climax; consumation closure; death before rebirth; cessation and completion of growth and development).
9. Justice: (fairness; oughtness; suitability; architectonic quality; necessity; inevitability; disinterestedness; nonpartiality).
10. Simplicity: (honesty; nakedness; essentiality; abstract, unmistakability; essential skeletal structure; the heart of the matter; bluntness; only that which is necessary; without ornament; nothing extra or superfluous).
11. Richness: (differentiation; complexity; intricacy; totality; nothing missing or hidden; all there; "nonimportance"; i.e., everything is equally important; nothing is unimportant; everything left the way it is; without improving, simplifying, abstracting, rearranging).
12. Effortlessness: (ease; lack of strain, striving, or difficulty; grace; perfect and beautiful functioning).
13. Playfulness: (fun; joy; amusement; gaiety; humor; exuberance; effortlessness).
14. Self-sufficiency: (autonomy; independence; not-needing-anything-other-than-itself-in-order-to-be-itself; self-determining; environment-transcendence; separateness; living by its own laws; identity).
"...self actualizing means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption. It means experiencing without the self-consciousness of the adolescent. At this moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment.....the key word for this is "selflessly," and our youngsters suffer from too little selflessness and to much self-consciousness, self-awareness."
"To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process; it means making of the many single choices about whether to lie or be honest, whether to steal or not to steal at a particular point, and it means to make each of these choices as a growth choice. This is movement toward self-actualization."
"Looking within oneself for many of the answers implies taking responsibility. That is in itself a great step towards actualization....one can see it, can feel it, can know the moment of responsibility. Then there is a clear knowing of what it feels like. This is one of the great steps. Each time one takes responsibility, this is an actualizing of the self."
"The art world, in my opinion, has been captured by a small group of opinion- and taste-makers about whom I feel suspicious. That is an ad hominem judgement, but it seems fair enough for people who set themselves up as able to say, 'You like what I like or else you are a fool.' We must teach people to listen to their own tastes. Most people don't do it."
"Making an honest statement involves daring to be different, unpopular, nonconformist...to be courageous rather than afraid is a another version of the same thing."
"...self actualization is not only an end state but also the process of actualizing one's potentialities at any time, in any amount. It is, for example, a matter of becoming smarter by studying if one is an intelligent person. Self-actualization means using one's intelligence. It does not mean doing some far-out thing necessarily, but it may mean going through an arduous and demanding period of preparation in order to realize one's possibilities....self actualization means working to do well the thing that one wants to do."
"...peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization. They are moments of ecstasy which cannot be taught, cannot be guaranteed, cannot be sought. One must be, as C.S. Lewis wrote, 'surprised by joy.' "
"...finding out who one is, what he is, what he likes, what he doesn't like, what is good for him and what is bad, where he is going and what his mission is - opening oneself up to himself...it means identifying defenses, and after defenses have been identified, it means finding the courage to give them up.
"This is painful because defenses are erected against something which is unpleasant. But giving up the defenses is worthwhile. If the psychoanalytic literature has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that repression is not a good way of solving problems."
"...self-actualization is not a matter of one great moment. It is not true that on Thursday at four o'clock the trumpet blows and one steps into the pantheon forever and altogether. Self-actualization is a matter of degree, of little accessions accumulated one by one."
[Source: http://tidefans.com/forums/showthread.php?p=58727]
Book: The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, by Abraham H. Maslow